Use Synonyms and Slot Value Validation in your Amazon Lex Chatbots

You can now provide synonyms for slot values in Amazon Lex. With the synonym functionality, you can specify multiple synonyms for a slot value in your chatbot. The synonyms specified are resolved to the corresponding slot values. For example, if the slot value is “comedy”, with “funny” and “humorous” specified as synonyms, then user input of “funny” will now be resolved to “comedy”. You can optimize your business logic to implement code for just the slot value instead of entire set of synonyms. In addition, the chatbot automatically resolves minor variants of the slot value to the original value without the user having to explicitly specify the synonym. For example, if “pineapple” is one of the slot values and the user value is “pineapples” then the slot is resolved to the value “pineapple”.

You can also now validate user input and restrict it to a fixed set of values. You can enable this by configuring the slot resolution strategy so that the slot is resolved only if the user value is the same as one of the slot values or the synonym.

These new features are available with Amazon Lex in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS region. Visit the Amazon Lex documentation to learn more about these features.

Additional Reading

Learn how to build better bots using Amazon Lex – a two part series.